We are loving this series - VAGINA DISPATCHES - great tool for education. 'Improve your genital knowledge'.

1: Vagina dispatches - the vulvaMona and Mae build a giant vulva, then talk to a gynecologist, a labiaplasty surgeon and a trans woman, to find out what vulvas really look like.

2:Vagina dispatches - stopping periodsMona and Mae speak to a doctor who thinks periods are unnatural, a former Olympian, a menstrual blood artist and a formerly incarcerated woman to find out if we should stop having periods.

3: Vagina dispatches - the orgasm gapWomen are less likely to orgasm than men – but is it really more difficult for women? Mona and Mae go into the lab with a neuroscientist who measures orgasms to try and find the answer.

4:Vagina dispatches - what you didn't learn in sex edIt’s not just about sex. Sex education should be giving us the information we need to feel in control of our bodies and make informed decisions about them – but it’s failing. In episode four of Vagina Dispatches, we speak to our moms, friends and sex educators to find out why. Then we give the basics on some topics that are missing from the curriculum, from discharge to menopause.

In My Brilliant Friend, the first novel in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series, a pubescent Elena Greco worries that she will lose her friend Lila, and finds that “that idea brought on a weary exhaustion.” Soon after, she gets her period for the first time. The juxtaposition—worry, exhaustion, menstruation—is not definitive, but it is suggestive. In culture, the female body is fraught ground: as women, we can be uncomfortable talking about our bodies, in part because when we do, we’re often heard incorrectly, incompletely, or not at all. “I feel like a traitor admitting that PMS lays me flat,” wrote novelist Diana Spechler in May of this year for The New York Times’s Opinionator blog. At Slate, Laura Bennett recently bemoaned the proliferation of confessional essays, in which women wrote intimately about their bodies and bodily functions. The female body remains a thing to be hidden and tamed, rather than listened to or written about.

Ferrante’s attention to the female body has been one of the great pleasures of her Neopolitan series, which concluded with the publication, in September, of The Story of the Lost Child. Chronicling, with thrilling intensity, a life-long friendship between two women, Elena Greco and Lila Cerullo, born in an impoverished Neopolitan neighborhood at midcentury, Ferrante lets the bodies of her female characters not only function but also speak. Elena and Lila bleed; they get pregnant, and gain weight, and nurse babies, and do their hair. And Ferrante’s attention extends past the—traditionally female—domestic or romantic spheres. “All the characters,” Lidija Haas noted in the Times Literary Supplement, “but the women first of all, feel in their bodies … the constant blows of the system in which they live.” Ferrante’s women experience abandonment, injustice, emotion, on their very skin—and this is treated not as weakness, but plainly as fact.

Take, for instance, the stereotype of women as vengeful harridans, furious beyond all reason when scorned. The Story of a New Name, the second in the series, opens at sixteen-year-old Lila’s wedding. When the bride, insulted by an ex-suitor, turns livid, Elena feels not fear or dismay, but a kind of joy: “[Lila’s] rage expanded in my breast, a force that was mine and not mine, filling me with the pleasure of losing myself.” What might, in another author’s hands, read as typically female volatility is here presented as powerful, even logical: “If nothing could save us,” Elena thinks, exhilarated, as her friend tugs insistently on the groom’s arm, in an attempt to spur him to defend her, “not money, not a male body, and not even studying, we might as well destroy everything immediately.” Elena watches as Lila abruptly storms out.

Or, consider the double-bind of contraception. In the third book, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena, now a wife and an author with two daughters and one book to her name, decides she does not want another child. Sapped of the ability and will to write by her first two pregnancies, she is determined not to sacrifice body or mind to a third. And yet the solutions at her disposal all also involve, to a certain degree, a loss of control over her own body: condoms prolong her already unpleasant sexual encounters with her husband; oral contraception means putting herself at the mercy of artificial hormones. Elena goes on the pill and promptly gains weight. “I felt as if I’d swelled up,” she reports flatly, “yet I didn’t dare stop.” What’s impressive is not that Elena can bear the insult to her body—but that this insult remains both common, and rarely dramatized. (Meanwhile her husband, who has to be prodded to do so much as one sink of dishes, looks at her pimples and wonders if she’s sick.)

Elena and Lila bleed; they get pregnant, and gain weight, and nurse babies, and do their hair

A theme throughout the series, it is in The Story of the Lost Child that Ferrante’s preoccupation with the female body is at its most potent. Elena has struggled, since childhood, to live a life of the mind. Determined to leave the poverty and violence of her Neopolitan neighborhood, she has studied, tried to make her “head masculine, so that it would be accepted by the culture of men.” And in these efforts she has, up to now, succeeded, leaving Naples for a university in Pisa, marrying the son of Northern intellectuals, and publishing a well-received novel. But of course this can’t last—such self-denial never can, and perhaps it shouldn’t. For Elena, in any case, it doesn’t: before The Story of the Lost Child begins, her marriage has failed and her second novel has been rejected.

Abandoning fiction, Elena writes a slim tract, an exploration of “the invention of women by men,” of the way in which the logic of the masculine head unjustly dominates the sensations of the female body. Abandoning her husband, to whom she has never been attracted, she begins a torrid affair with a man from her hometown, Nino Sarratore. Over the course of three books, Elena has fought her body—and, by extension, her crude, vulgar roots. Now, in The Story of the Lost Child, Elena, for the first time, allows her wild, desiring flesh free rein.

Elena learns to listen to her female body and its impulses in Italy in the 1970s, but in the last few years these themes have reemerged as important preoccupations in literary circles. Maggie Nelson’s memoir The Argonauts for instance, published last year, mixes visceral descriptions of her pregnancy and childbirth with quotations from Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler, and William James, among others, placing theory and the physical experience of motherhood on the same plane. In one scene, Nelson recalls attending a seminar in 1998, where feminist theorist Jane Gallop presents new work, and art critic Rosalind Krauss is slated to respond. Gallop’s work turns out to center on photographs taken of her and her young son; Krauss’s reaction is tart. “The tacit undercurrent of her argument, as I felt it,” writes Nelson, “was that Gallop’s maternity had rotted her mind … Krauss acted as though Gallop should be ashamed for trotting out naked pictures of herself and her son in the bathtub.” It is an argument that Nelson’s whole book—she includes a graphic description of the birth of her own son—pushes back against.

Ariella, Elisa Albert’s protagonist in After Birth, reacts to a similarly dismissive attitude towards maternity with a snappy one-liner. Ari is a new mother, and the experience has made her more aware of the physical differences between women and men. At a Christmas Eve dinner, she alarms, and delights in alarming, other guests—one “dead-eyed” woman in particular—by breast-feeding her one-year-old son. “I will not,” Ari fumes silently, “go sit in the toilet in the middle of my dinner so you don’t have to trouble yourself about the fact that you’re a bipedal mammal, bitch.”

But if Ferrante, too, embraces what is viscerally feminine, she also encounters problems with it. Her enthusiastic narration of the experience of having a female body is above all factual. She remains clear-eyed. Obeying one’s womanly urges does not, in Ferrante’s world as in the world outside her fiction, necessarily lead to freedom, and Elena remains trapped within the ceaseless flow of events that characterize both the passage of time and this quartet of novels. The illness and eventual death of Elena’s mother; an earthquake that devastates Naples; her sister’s relationship with a local gangster; her eldest daughter’s rebellion—these are facts that Elena must in any case face, whether with a masculine mind, or with a feminine body.

Even Elena’s most impulsive decision—the one spurred most specifically by the desires of her female body—does not, in the end, bring satisfaction. Elena wants to believe that she is loosing a bond and escaping male domination when she leaves her husband for Nino. But perhaps she swaps one type of constraint for another. After all, being with Nino means returning to Naples, to the brutal, ignorant world she has so recently escaped. And it means, as she discovers months into the affair, accepting that Nino will never leave his wife, that he will even continue sleeping with her. “Was I lying to myself,” Elena wonders, “when I portrayed myself as free and autonomous?” In turning away from the masculine mind, has she made herself a slave to the feminine body?

Ferrante does not answer this question. Nino is able to indulge the desires of his body while knowing he will never face severe consequences. But for Elena, questions about the body—what to do with it, whether to listen to it—hang over the rest of the novel.

In Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, Elena, working on her second book, worries over the word “become”: “It was a verb that had always obsessed me, but I realized it for the first time … I wanted to become, even though I had never known what.” In The Story of the Lost Child, Elena finishes the process of becoming and becomes. Now a successful writer in late middle-age, she lives alone, with a dog, unattached. She is old more than she is male or female. The reward for surviving your life—or perhaps the punishment or perhaps just the result—the Neopolitan novels seem to imply, is to end up in a body whose signals might at last be clear. Memories remain, but they are no longer freighted with desperate joy, or desperate sorrow. In place of wild desires, the throb of hormones, the stab of abandonment, there is hunger, and weight, and perhaps the ache of arthritis. And is that not a kind of relief?

Donald Trump has found himself in the unlikely situation of having to fend off an onslaught of tweets from women live-tweeting their periods at him.The outspoken business tycoon is being targeted on Twitter after clashing with Fox News host Megyan Kelly during the GOP debate over his disparaging comments about women.

SEE MORE: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn

"Womyn" is one of several alternative spellings of the English word "women" used by some feminists.[1] There are many alternative spellings, including "womban" and "womon" (singular), and "wimmin" (plural). Some writers who use alternative spellings may see them as an expression of female independence and a repudiation of traditions that define females by reference to a male norm.[2]

WomanIn Old English sources, the word "man" was gender-neutral, with a meaning similar to the modern English usage of "one" as an indefinite pronoun. The words wer and wyfwere used to specify a man or woman where necessary, respectively. Combining them into wer-man or wyf-man expressed the concept of "any man" or "any woman".[3][4]Feminist writers have suggested that the less prejudicial usage of the Old English sources reflects more egalitarian notions of gender at the time. [2]Reasoning[edit]Some feminists object to the fact that "woman" and "women" are "man" and "men" with a "wo-" prepended.“By taking the "men" and "man" out of the words "woman" and "women" we are symbolically saying that we do not need men to be "complete". We, as womyn, are not a sub-category of men. We are not included in many of the history books, studies and statistics that are done in male dominated societies, thus they do not apply to us, for in these items we do not exist. In these societies men are the "norm" and women the "particular," a mere sub-category of the "norm," of men. The re-spelling of the word "woman" is a statement that we refused to be defined by men. We are womyn and only we have the right to define our relationships with ourselves, society, with other womyn and men. These re-spellings work as a symbolic act of looking at and defining ourselves as we really are, not how men and society view us, but through our own female views of ourselves, as self-defined womyn.[5]”Variants[edit]Womon/womyn[edit]"Womyn" appeared as an Older Scots spelling of "woman"[6] in the Scots poetry of James Hogg. Its usage as a feminist spelling of "women" (with "womon" as the singular form) first appeared in print in the 1970's.Womon/wimmin[edit]"Wimmin" appeared in 19th century renderings of Black American English, without any feminist significance. Z. Budapest promoted the use of "wimmin" (singular "womon") in the 1970s as part of her Dianic Wicca movement, which claims that present-day patriarchy represents a fall from a matriarchal golden age.[7]

'To find out if I really know what turns me on, I wondered whether I could lend my vagina to science like the human guinea pigs recruited by William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the famed research duo depicted in Showtime's Masters of Sex. Although the foundation established by Masters and Johnson closed in 1994, I learned that arousal was still a main research focus of its predecessor, the Kinsey Institute. Since no related clinical trial was underway when I contacted Janssen, I volunteered for a special experiment of his design, based on those he'd conducted in the past. By comparing my subjective impressions about what is and isn't sexy to objective data about what happens to me "down there," I hoped that the Kinsey researchers would reveal whether a vagina-brain disconnect was preventing me from reaching full satisfaction.'

A woman in Sweden has given birth to a baby boy using a transplanted womb, in a medical first, doctors report.The 36-year-old mother, who was born without a uterus, received a donated womb from a friend in her 60s.The British medical journal The Lancet says the baby was born prematurely in September weighing 1.8kg (3.9lb). The father said his son was "amazing".Cancer treatment and birth defects are the main reasons women can be left without a functioning womb.If they want a child of their own, their only option is surrogacy.Medical marvelThe identity of the couple in Sweden has not been released, but it is known the mother still had functioning ovaries.He's no different from any other child, but he will have a good story to tell.The boy's fatherThe couple went through IVF to produce 11 embryos, which were frozen. Doctors at the University of Gothenburg then performed the womb transplant.The donor was a 61-year-old family friend who had gone through the menopause seven years earlier.Drugs to suppress the immune system were needed to prevent the womb being rejected.A year after the transplant, doctors decided they were ready to implant one of the frozen embryos and a pregnancy ensued.The baby was born prematurely, almost 32 weeks into the pregnancy, after the mother developed pre-eclampsia and the baby's heart rate became abnormal.Both baby and mum are now said to be doing well.In an anonymous interview with the AP news agency, the father said: "It was a pretty tough journey over the years, but we now have the most amazing baby."He's no different from any other child, but he will have a good story to tell.''

Media captionSurgeon Richard Smith on the prospects for British womb transplants'Step change'Two other medical teams have attempted womb transplants before.In one case, the organ became diseased and had to be removed after three months. Another case resulted in miscarriages.Prof Mats Brannstrom, who led the transplant team, described the birth in Sweden as a joyous moment."That was a fantastic happiness for me and the whole team, but it was an unreal sensation also because we really could not believe we had reached this moment."Our success is based on more than 10 years of intensive animal research and surgical training by our team and opens up the possibility of treating many young females worldwide that suffer from uterine infertility."Liza Johannesson, a gynaecological surgeon in the team, said: "It gives hope to those women and men that thought they would never have a child, that thought they were out of hope."However, there are still doubts about the safety and effectiveness of the invasive procedure.Dr Brannstrom and his team are working with another eight couples with a similar need. The results of those pregnancy attempts will give a better picture of whether this technique can be used more widely.Dr Allan Pacey, the chairman of the British Fertility Society, told the BBC News website: "I think it is brilliant and revolutionary and opens the door to many infertile women."The scale of it feels a bit like IVF. It feels like a step change. The question is can it be done repeatedly, reliably and safely."The couple, fresh from celebrating the birth of their child, will soon have to decide if they want a second.The drugs used to prevent the womb being rejected would be damaging in the long term - so the couple will either try again or have the womb removed.